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means progress means people - the
more people, the more progress - the
more prosperity. Too late we have seen
that it also means more pollution, more
filth, more death.
"Little by little, I remember," contin–
ued the famed radio-TV personality at
the UNESCO conference, "the same
thing happened to the Passaic River and
the Hackensack and Berry's Creek. Of
course, the Hudson had long since been
ruined, even before Henry Fulton's
time.
"That's the way it all happened,
I
think. Nobody ever noticed except
tbe
kids and the folks downstream - who
themselves sooner or later sold out to
progress and joined the growing econ–
omy."
It
is
a dismal fact that most industri–
ally advanced nations have seriously
contaminated and despoiled almost
every one of their major water sources.
Potent industrial acids and chemicals,
and ruinous mineral wastes "uglify"
once pristine pure rivers and streams.
Agricultura! pesticides poison and
kill
millions of fish and other forros of
aquatic life.
Nitrogen fettilizet runoff from farm–
lands - emerging as possibly the Num–
ber One water pollution villain - over–
fertilize and thereby deprive streams,
rivers, and lakes of dissolved oxygen.
Phosphates, released from municipal
sewage treatment plants add to stream
and lake eutrophication.
Animal wastes from feedlots in urban
areas - in sorne cases so ladened with
cbemicals that they will hardly decoro–
pose - represent another serious form
of water pollution. In rural areas, ani–
mal wastes enter the soil as part of a
nah1ral cyde. In cities, manure from
feedlots becomes just another pollution
headache.
In many cases the load of fiJth and
poisons have long ago overwhelmed the
natural ability of rivers to purify them–
selves. Sorne watercourses - offi.cially
designated by the
U.
S. Interior Depart–
ment as "industrial rivers" - are dead,
serving no more value than that of open
industrial sewers. The Cuyahoga River,
which oozes its way through Cleveland
to Lake Erie is so oi l slicked and refuse–
polluted that it has even caught fire.
It
has earned the dubious title of "the
only body of water ever classified as a
fire hazard."
Major
U.
S. lakes are on their way
out. Lake Erie is considered at least half
dead because of eutrophication and in–
dustrial pollution. Lake Michigan is
going through a similar man-induced
aging process. Even Lake Superior is
threatened with increasing accumula–
tions of pollutants.
Lake Baikal in remote Siberia, the
largest fresh -water lake in the world,
Herron - Block
Stor
és
becoming contaminated
discharged from pulp
making plants.
by pollutants
and paper-
Thermal pollution from huge steam
or nudear-powered electric generating
plants is adding another disastrous di–
mension to the water pollution crisis. Jt
has been estimated that by the year
2000, about 80% of the fresh water
supply of the U. S. will be cycled
through cooling systems of electric gen–
erating plants, heating downst ream